Apr 1, 2014

On February 24 this year, Japanese mobile phone maker Sony Mobile made official its new Android-based flagship device, in the form of Xperia Z2, yet the device isn’t shipping as of now.

However, even before being actually released on shelves, the phone has been rooted, and a ClockworkMod Recovery is now available for it, it seems. The smartphone too will arrive very soon, so this is good news for enthusiasts. As detailed in an XDA-Developers Forum thread, the Touch Recovery is based on CWM Recovery 6.0.4.6 and comes from renowned developer DooMLoRD, that was helped by Koush people involved in the CyanogenMod project. Apparently, all the testing was performed on a user’s handset, and the installation of the ClockworkMod Recovery requires that the handset’s bootloader be unlocked. At the same time, those interested in trying out the new piece of software will need to make sure that they have a working fastboot on the phone, and that the device is running under stock Android 4.4.2 KitKat firmware (version 17.1.A.2.36 - v01).

Some issues with this still exist, as the recovery needs an unlocked bootloader which, in its turn, requires TA backup. Without it, DRM keys will be irreversibly lost. Furthermore, it appears that adb is not working in recovery, though this issue can be resolved in the future. On the other hand, the camera on Xperia Z2 will still work after unlocking the bootloader. Flashing the software through fastboot requires that users download the kernel image, save the boot.img to the folder containing fastboot binary, then flash it using the “fastboot flash boot boot.img” command. Then, simply reboot using the “fastboot reboot” command. To root the device, users will need to download the latest SuperSU update.zip, save it on the phone’s microSD card, and then reboot into recovery. From there, they will need to flash the SuperSu update.zip and reboot from recovery into OS.

According to DooMLoRD, users should also strongly consider installing busybox after rooting. It can be found in the Google Play Store and should be installed on/system/xbin. All the necessary info on the files needed for rooting and installing the custom recovery on Sony Xperia Z2 can be found in the aforementioned forum thread. Links to the downloadable files are available there as well. Just keep in mind that rooting a smartphone will void warranty. Users will be the only ones held responsible in the event that anything happens with the smartphone when trying to tweak it.